AP sues aggregator over “parasitic business model”

The Associated Press is making good on threats to sue content aggregators, …

The Associated Press is suing a paid news subscription company, alleging Tuesday that repackaging the wire service's news content is a "parasitic business model."

The suit (PDF) blasts the Meltwater Group of San Francisco, saying the 10-year-old company's subscription service charges a fee for "content created at the expense and through the labor of others."

Meltwater has about 18,000 customers, who pay at least $5,000 annually for searchable content Meltwater acquires by scraping the 162,000 online news sources it monitors, the AP said. Meltwater also includes a "hot off the wire" database "to attract potential customers," the AP said.

New York-based AP is demanding a federal judge block the service from continuing operation, and is seeking damages of up to $150,000 an infringement.

Meltwater, which was not immediately prepared to comment, said in a statement that the company "respects copyright and operates a complementary service that directs users to publisher websites, just like any other search engine."

The company said it was performing the services of a search engine, but customized for paying customers who want it to track stories via keywords across 190 countries in 100 languages. "We are confident that our service is compliant with U.S. copyright law, with the U.S. courts having repeatedly held that internet search is legal," the company said.

Meltwater is also accused of archiving articles as far back as 2007, and providing news "no longer freely available on the internet—either because of the original article has been removed from the internet or placed behind an archive paywall by the hosting website."

The AP, which is a news cooperative counting many of the nation's major media outlets as its members, said the suit was not an attack on aggregation blogs in general. Meltwater, according to the suit, "most notably is a closed system sold only to subscribers for a fee, and not a means of expanding public access."

And last year, the wire service settled out of court with Shepard Fairey over who owned the rights to the iconic Obama "Hope" poster. According to the settlement’s terms, the two sides agreed “to work together going forward with the Hope image and share the rights to make the posters and merchandise bearing the Hope image and to collaborate on a series of images that Fairey will create based on AP photographs.”

41 Reader Comments

Strategy: sue the small fry, convince them to settle or get some precedent, then sue Google for News, profit!

This has nothing to do with Google. Google doesn't charge you to search for news, does it? Meltwater charges $5,000 for essentially the SAME DAMN THING. You tell me who is the crook here.

They clearly provide a different or better service than Google or else no one would use it. Even if they basically did the same thing as Google, how would it make them a "crook" to sell it to people? Are they breaking into businesses and forcing them to use the service? Is it wrong to charge for a product if someone else gives it away? Especially if I think my product is better or more specialized? I doubt they're tricking companies out of $5000/year for something that Google provides. Their customers could probably get the info from Google, but it would take more work, which is what they're paying Meltwater for.

If they are actually storing copies of entire AP articles, then they're going to be in trouble here. If their archive is summaries of the actual information from those articles, there's no problem. You can't copyright news/data/information, just the particular expression of the data. It doesn't look like the "hot news doctrine" is really an issue here, because they are providing links.